Sally wrote: <<Kai wrote, among other good stuff: <<<with Vila one always gets the feeling he should sound more colloquial than <<he does.> << <<This is a problem with Vila in English as well :-) I've read a number of <<stories where he's written with a heavy and intrusive 'dialect', supposedly <<to emphasise his lower class, and always find it distracting.>>
The dialect thing is one question I think I did ignore completely. Finnish does have a rich variety of distinct regional dialects, which can be written out fairly easily, but they are not socially coded in a way that many British English dialects still seem to be. Travis 2's accent played no role in my translation of "Star One".
With Vila it seems to be more an attitude, rather than anything specifically tied to either vocabulary or pronunciation, that screams "informal" in my ear. I agree that a thick dialect would be just pandering to a contemporary stereotype. I wouldn't mind a more liberal use of dialects in the series, as long as they didn't go to feed the existing prejudices (where are those illiterate, ignorant beggars who speak perfect RP?)
<<<It may also be the dialogue's tendency towards the kind of neutral sci-fi <<dialect, where temporal tell-tale signs like contemporary slang or <<pronounced regional accents are downplayed to homogenise the language and <<also to make it sound more "timeless".> << <<I also think any attempt to invent 'new' slang or word usages tend tto jar <<horribly (in Stardrive, for instance).>>
I don't find the stabs at slang in "Stardrive" or elsewhere problematic, but I do find the question of slang use in speculative fiction in general very much so. Of course, language, just like technological or social details, changes over time and what seems absolutely utopian now, may well sound antiquated or worse, unintelligible half a century later (how about Avon telling Vila to "hide the oodle" in "Gambit" or Servalan telling Travis to "ice Blake and his havage"). Still the linguistic conservatism of the space opera genre particularly annoys me sometimes. Apart from the requisite technical gobbledygook (something that Blake's 7 mostly handles with dignity; no "abfurcating the endoligroinial coils in the taurofecal wanga-wangas" here), there is little linguistic invention, as if to confirm that despite the tinfoil clothes and Fairy bottle rockets we're still playing the old game of cowboys and Indians and this is the way that all people talk everywhere, now and in the future. Even antiquated jargon might sound better, simply because of its defamiliarising effect.
Again we can say that what we are hearing is actually a translation in itself, and the language that the characters really speak is not English at all or is an eight hundred years older variant of English that bears as little resemblance to Modern English as Modern English does to the language of Beowulf. Yet you'd think that people who have grown up in completely different circumstances on planets with no mutual contact in centuries would not sound like they went to the same public school or referred to things that neither of their cultures probably has had in ages. Things can stay in the language long after the original concepts have disappeared or lost validity, but though lot of Western languages retain metaphors or expressions coined by nomadic tribes a couple of thousand years ago, it's a bit too conceited to expect all our petty little things that are currently in fashion to be around pestering the people after a couple of thousand more years (even if you are just using the future as an allegory for passions present or past).
So yes, as easy as it is to get it wrong, I would like to see more linguistic innovation is science fiction, new slang, new colloquialisms, new expressions. I like Vila's "bubble in a black hole", Cally's "may you die alone and silent" (which I read as the most vulgar curse ever said in the series) or Bayban's "son of a slimecrawler". Far from original perhaps, but at least something that you could imagine has risen out of the characters' respective circumstances. Something that in its own little way enhances the illusion that these people actually are born out of, belong to and have to function within this make-believe world, instead of the impression that they have just walked in from a very late-20th century pub or detox clinic.
Kai
On Sat, Nov 24, 2001 at 07:57:19PM +0200, Kai V Karmanheimo wrote:
Again we can say that what we are hearing is actually a translation in itself, and the language that the characters really speak is not English at all or is an eight hundred years older variant of English that bears as little resemblance to Modern English as Modern English does to the language of Beowulf. Yet you'd think that people who have grown up in completely different circumstances on planets with no mutual contact in centuries would not sound like they went to the same public school or referred to things that neither of their cultures probably has had in ages. Things can stay in the language long after the original concepts have disappeared or lost validity, but though lot of Western languages retain metaphors or expressions coined by nomadic tribes a couple of thousand years ago, it's a bit too conceited to expect all our petty little things that are currently in fashion to be around pestering the people after a couple of thousand more years (even if you are just using the future as an allegory for passions present or past).
But B7 isn't the worst at this, not by a long shot -- or maybe it's just that Australian culture is closer to British culture in many ways than to US culture... but the most glaringly disconcerting use of non-futuristic language in a far-future SF setting was something I came across in David Brin's "Glory Season". The problem was, the situation set up in that story was supposed to be thousands of years in the future; a human-descended civilization which had colonized that planet at least 3000 years ago. And there's a puzzle in the story (not a major plot point, really but...) where the key to an ancient mechanism (yeah, yeah, shades of Indiana Jones) was in a form of pictures, and you had to pick the correct ones. There were pictures of animals and ordinary household objects -- such as a jar of jam. The clue she had was a pun on the correct words... but it didn't use the word jam, it used the word "jelly". That really threw me out of the story because it was so US-centric that I became aware of the complete unlikelihood that even in the timescale of a thousand years (remember, it as an Ancient Mechanism) her own language wouldn't have changed such that the clue, based on a pun, would have been useless -- puns don't translate. As well as the unlikelihood that her language, thousands and thousands of years from today, would have retained a linguistic artefact which was exactly paralleled by the peculiarities of *one* dialect of English... well, as I said, it threw me out of the story.
The difficulty with this, and indeed with trying to create any futuristic language use (such as Kai was complaining of the lack of in B7) is that most native English-speakers are completely unaware of (a) the non-translatability of puns and (b) the high level of idioms we use in our everyday speech. Idioms don't translate either.
But I think expecting B7 to be linguistically aware is asking a bit much. If they can't get the science right, how on earth could one expect them to get the linguistics right? A lot more people in the SF world know science than know linguistics...
Probably the best person to get to write non-culture-imbedded language might be someone who spends a lot of time talking to new migrants or similar people who are non-native English speakers, and thus are more aware of what things are idioms and what things aren't.
Actually, in B7, the thing that bugged me about the language use was not the slang that the Space Rats used -- I thought that was rather good -- but the jokes that Vila told in "Ultraworld". Where to space-pilots park their ships? By parking meteors.
That jarred, because "parking meters" is such a late-20th-century concept that I find it hard to believe that a culture such as 28th-century Federated Earth is going to *have* such things as parking meters; we don't even know if private individuals are allowed to own their own vehicles, necessarily, and if they didn't then the concept of parking meters would be nonsensical. Of if everyone used air-cars, then maybe the concept of "parking" isn't the same. Do you see what I mean? That kind of thing bugged me much more than whether calling someone a "gook" sounds silly or not.
Of course, one thing that I don't think anyone writing SF is very likely to do is write a story in which the *meanings* of well-known words have changed (or at least, the most common, salient meaning has changed). Even though we've observed such a phenomenon in our own lifetimes with the word "gay". Their readers would be too confused if, say, calling someone "blue" was a deadly insult, or if "typewriter" meant "an obsolete holo-projector" etc. Easier on the brain to use new words.
Kathryn Andersen -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Mercury, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver, and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned."
Kai wrote:
Again we can say that what we are hearing is actually a translation in itself, and the language that the characters really speak is not English at all or is an eight hundred years older variant of English that bears as little resemblance to Modern English as Modern English does to the language of Beowulf.
I think I'm most comfortable with that idea.
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Harriet Monkhouse -
Kai V Karmanheimo -
Kathryn Andersen